9 ms·

Good. The stalkerware problem is bigger than most people realize. Teens whose parents use Life360 to stalk them are already well aware of the issue. http://www

Good. The stalkerware problem is bigger than most people realize. Teens whose parents use Life360 to stalk them are already well aware of the issue. http://www.wired.com/story/life360-location-tracking-families/ http://www.wired.com/story/life360-location-tracking-familie...

droithomme 7y ago
> Teens whose parents use... The FTC order allows them to do so. The problem was the apps are marketed to monitor employees and minors of which the installer is the legal guardian, both which are completely legal. But it was being used in some cases by customers to monitor other adults, which is not legal without consent. The company agreed to get the users to check a box saying it was being used for minors or employees, both which remain legal uses of the apps.
- mindgam3 7y ago
  My point is: using these apps to monitor people without legal consent is super not cool, obviously, but there’s an even bigger problem which is parents relying on legal-but-shady stalking apps. Parents and kids need to be able to trust each other. Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    In my opinion, parents have more of a right to closely monitor and track their minor children than does Google, the US government, the child's school, the company supplying the child's school's tech for free, Facebook, Apple, etc. All those, by strangers, are being done as we speak with little complaint but here we have the parent monitoring their child argued as some massive privacy invasion. Yet if the parent fails to closely monitor the child and something happens to the child the parent is charged with neglect and abuse, CPS gets involved, and the child is whisked away to foster care.
    - justtopostthis3 7y ago
      Even if all of those big faceless entities have the ability to monitor my every moment, I simply can't imagine anyone finding time in the day to bother. My mother, on the other hand...
      - TallGuyShort 7y ago
        ... is one of two people biologically programmed to love and protect you at all costs. And again, the ultimate one in your list who actually has a responsibility for you. The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either. I don't think spying on your kids should be common, but I absolutely know people who have had kids get into some trouble or have good reason to be worried about their safety, and use some "spying" apps to keep an eye on them and help with accountability. I've known helicopter parents, for sure, but I've also known parents who have had close calls with kidnappings, kids who had some brushes with the law and were struggling to keep their distance from the wrong crowd, etc. If a tool fills a need for safety or helps keep honest kids honest, sometimes that's the right tool for the job while they go through the awkward phase of being adolescent: dependent on their parents, the responsibility of their parents, but not mature enough to be 100% on their own and making serious life-affecting decisions.
        dependenttypes 7y ago
        > ... is one of two people biologically programmed to love and protect you at all costs Would you say the same for the many parents that are in jail for abusing their children? > The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either. The government is the one who will put your parents to jail if they neglect you. Most of the arguments that I have seen regarding parents being allowed to spy on their children also apply to the government.
        TallGuyShort 7y ago
        Oh you picked two phrases you could disagree with in isolation with reductio ad absurdum? Bravo. Yes, some people abuse children and go to jail. No, that doesn't mean that no other parent should have the ability to monitor their child. Blanket government surveillance is bad, and I said the same thing about parents spying. But I have no problem with specific cases of specific individuals judged as needing closer monitoring, like ankle monitors for flight risks.
  - prepend 7y ago
    Surveilling your kids is not the complete answer, but it is certainly part of the answer. I think there’s a false assumption that these kinds of apps are used by parents to replace communication and other methods, but it’s part of strong communication between kids and parents.
    - notzuck 7y ago
      Another reasonable point downvoted on HN as this comment will be too I'm sure. Some parents will abuse this ability and there's nothing to government should do about that. Good parenting is hard and some form of tracking is important. My daughter had a phone from the age of 10, she uses it for google and email at school (it's part of their classes), texting me when her bus is near the bus stop so I can drive to collect her and for texting her friends. She is not allowed to use her phone to install apps that can communicate with people that she does not already know and this is something I periodically check on with the view that I will check less as she gets older. I am actually super impressed that she is not addicted to her phone like you would imagine a young girl would be. One of her friends does have instagram and other social media, I have checked her pages out and she has many followers that are men and much older than her. I wish her parents would check her phone more often. Regardless of what some childless anons on the Internet think, it's bloody hard to parent in the age of the iPhone. A simple solution is to not let your kids have anything but I've always believed that giving access to what everyone else has is fine as long as it's controlled with reasonable boundaries put in place.
      - jsjohnst 7y ago
        > Another reasonable point downvoted on HN as this comment will be too I'm sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        notzuck 7y ago
        Yeah I can read. Doesn't mean I still don't want to moan about people downvoting him just because they're digging their heals in. He said something reasonable, a response would have been better than a downvote.
  - singingboyo 7y ago
    I commented on your original post, but: this seems like a parenting issue, and doesn't really have a technological or regulatory solution.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    > Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop. surveillance [1] n. Close observation of person or group, especially one under suspicion. n. The act of observing or the condition of being observed. --- This is CERTAINLY your responsibility toward your children. (The lack of it is known as "neglect".) Personally, I do not let my 6 year old go to the small neighborhood park by himself. But if he has a remote monitoring device, I do. As he gets older, there will be other cases where he will be allowed to do things only under some type of supervision. Obviously it varies by age and maturity, where age 0 requires earshot proximity, and age 17.5 requires comparatively minimal attention to diet, education, and recreation. "No surveillance full stop" is simply wrong. "No electronic surveillance" is I think unwise and ignores opportunities for safe, constructive experiences. "No secret surveillance" is I think a fair statement. https://www.wordnik.com/words/surveillance https://www.wordnik.com/words/surveillance
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      Just be careful and know when to change strategy. There will come an age where your son's concepts of trust and responsibility will undergo a metamorphosis, and ordering them to keep a surveillance device on them might make them develop trust issues, and atypical expectations of privacy in their personal relationships, which may take them their entire young adulthood to work through.
      - errantspark 7y ago
        I can't agree with this enough, and I feel like the slope along which you slide as you start treating your offspring as a human and not a ward should be steeper and start earlier in almost all cases. P.S. '93 til ;)
        soulofmischief 7y ago
        That song is the soundtrack to my life. As someone who still had a bedtime of 8pm in high school, I agree with you. I ended up leaving home at 16 just so I could live on my own terms.
    - 7y ago
  - 1000units 7y ago
    Kids are dumbasses and require supervision. This includes surveillance because they will inevitably try to hide important things from you.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
      I'm, by all measures and statistics, not a dumbass, and yet still qualify as a child / dependant. My parents gave up on trying to track / surveil me because I knew more about tech than they, and because it was more or less an open challenge to me to try and break whatever software they installed. Do you want someone peering over your shoulder and breathing down your neck all the time?
      - 1000units 7y ago
        No, because I'm now better equipped to guide my own life than my parents, and it would cause them unnecessary burden. I understand many parents are poorly equipped for this task to start, but that's a different problem. There are a very few people I really trust and love in my life, and if they had a crystal ball into my soul and history and could read my every thought and action, I wouldn't mind. In fact, if we were smarter and could handle that scale of information I'd even like it. I'm as open with the people I love as possible. Surveillance becomes an issue when it is done by adversaries, such as various large corporations you and many people here might work for, your government at every level, etc.
  - chooseaname 7y ago
    > Parents and kids need to be able to trust each other. Absolutely this. However, there's a caveat. If a minor gets in certain troubles, the parent is held responsible. So, if a parent knows their child has a tendency towards stuff that will get the parent in trouble, I'm a lot less against the parent using tech to keep the child in line.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop. I generally agree. But the solution here isn't lecturing people on the internet. The solution is helping parents find better parenting methods. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I've tried to write about it and one piece I wrote got more than 60k page views. But it didn't make me any money. And I'm quite open about being dirt poor and wanting to develop an earned income. On the one hand, I would like to see the world be a better place with better solutions. Poor parenting has larger consequences, including higher incarceration rates down the line. On the other hand, one of the things wrong with this world is the shitty way women get treated. Part of that is an expectation that they don't deserve an earned income for so-called "soft skills" (oft called emotional labor). They are expected to do caring type things out of the goodness of their heart. I've literally been helpful to people with big personal problems -- because I'm quite good at that -- while I was homeless and been told, more or less, "Fuck you. My needs matter. Yours don't. Quit panhandling the internet." So I'm at a point where I kind of feel like "No, fuck you. I don't owe you anything, you asshole." I stopped giving away so much of my time and expertise for free via the Internet to ungrateful assholes who think I don't deserve anything in return. I don't know how we make a better world. But I'm quite clear that volunteering to be a victim for the benefit of other people isn't it. All that does is teach them their abusive bullshit is totes fine. So if you want a solution here, find some way to help parents be better parents that doesn't involve them crapping on someone else in the process. I don't know how you do that because actual parenting experience fails to have the cache that college degrees have. So I don't know how you find someone with answers that actually work that the world will actually respect as a bona fide expert. College degrees don't necessarily confer genuine expertise in this domain, but it's the kind of thing audiences will pay for.
    - concordDance 7y ago
      Probably HN is the wrong venue to get sympathy. Here everyone is constantly giving away extremely valuable information for free. Information that is verifiably valuable as opposed to parental advice that you can't check the value of very easily People around here (and indeed in most of the internet) are paid for their information in attention and kudos. Your information would need to be almost unique and worth >£1000k for you to be able to sell it for money in todays attention starved market.
  - dannykwells 7y ago
    Sounds like someone doesn't have kids. Full stop.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  A better system would be to require that it is very clear the user is being monitored. Some kind of persistent notification and popup on every boot notifying the user of the software. This way it still works fine for corporate setups but is useless for stalkers
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I think macOS Catalina has taken some steps to implement this type of approach. Users will be notified when an application starts key logging or taking screenshots. I'm not sure how frequently though.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Never knew my employer was my legal guardian :-)
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  So I could legally stalk employees? That is a ridiculous back door.
singingboyo 7y ago
There's nothing forcing someone to install the app, at least in a stalker situation. Secretly install... maybe, but check your damn phone permissions, people! As with many things, there are good and bad use cases. For teens, it's a bit more complicated due to family dynamics, but frankly this seems like a parenting issue that has not changed significantly from how things worked before. Instead, it's just changed form slightly because parents can passively track rather than actively pestering their kids about where they were/are/will be. Bad parenting is not a technological creation. Also, maybe Life360 is just a questionable example, but as far as I know everything there can be toggled in app. Permissions can be denied too. Unless parental controls can stop those options?
- azernik 7y ago
  These apps were designed to be installed when the phone owner left their phone unguarded, and to be unnoticed by the phone owner. Poor man's Evil Maid attack. TFA: "To install the apps, the purchasers were required to bypass mobile device manufacturer restrictions, which the FTC alleges exposed the devices to security vulnerabilities and likely invalidated manufacturer warranties. In addition, while Retina-X claimed in its legal policies that the apps were intended for monitoring employees and children, Retina-X did not take any steps to ensure that its apps were being used for these purposes. Each of the apps provided purchasers with instructions on how to remove the app’s icon from appearing on the mobile device’s screen so that the device’s user would not know the app was installed on the device, according to the complaint."
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    I agree the evil maid attack is a misfeature. I assume many people use it without that aspect.
    - azernik 7y ago
      It's not a misfeature, it's the main intended market.

droithomme 7y ago

> Teens whose parents use... The FTC order allows them to do so. The problem was the apps are marketed to monitor employees and minors of which the installer is the legal guardian, both which are completely legal. But it was being used in some cases by customers to monitor other adults, which is not legal without consent. The company agreed to get the users to check a box saying it was being used for minors or employees, both which remain legal uses of the apps.

mindgam3 7y ago
My point is: using these apps to monitor people without legal consent is super not cool, obviously, but there’s an even bigger problem which is parents relying on legal-but-shady stalking apps. Parents and kids need to be able to trust each other. Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop.
- droithomme 7y ago
  In my opinion, parents have more of a right to closely monitor and track their minor children than does Google, the US government, the child's school, the company supplying the child's school's tech for free, Facebook, Apple, etc. All those, by strangers, are being done as we speak with little complaint but here we have the parent monitoring their child argued as some massive privacy invasion. Yet if the parent fails to closely monitor the child and something happens to the child the parent is charged with neglect and abuse, CPS gets involved, and the child is whisked away to foster care.
  - justtopostthis3 7y ago
    Even if all of those big faceless entities have the ability to monitor my every moment, I simply can't imagine anyone finding time in the day to bother. My mother, on the other hand...
    - TallGuyShort 7y ago
      ... is one of two people biologically programmed to love and protect you at all costs. And again, the ultimate one in your list who actually has a responsibility for you. The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either. I don't think spying on your kids should be common, but I absolutely know people who have had kids get into some trouble or have good reason to be worried about their safety, and use some "spying" apps to keep an eye on them and help with accountability. I've known helicopter parents, for sure, but I've also known parents who have had close calls with kidnappings, kids who had some brushes with the law and were struggling to keep their distance from the wrong crowd, etc. If a tool fills a need for safety or helps keep honest kids honest, sometimes that's the right tool for the job while they go through the awkward phase of being adolescent: dependent on their parents, the responsibility of their parents, but not mature enough to be 100% on their own and making serious life-affecting decisions.
      - dependenttypes 7y ago
        > ... is one of two people biologically programmed to love and protect you at all costs Would you say the same for the many parents that are in jail for abusing their children? > The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either. The government is the one who will put your parents to jail if they neglect you. Most of the arguments that I have seen regarding parents being allowed to spy on their children also apply to the government.
        TallGuyShort 7y ago
        Oh you picked two phrases you could disagree with in isolation with reductio ad absurdum? Bravo. Yes, some people abuse children and go to jail. No, that doesn't mean that no other parent should have the ability to monitor their child. Blanket government surveillance is bad, and I said the same thing about parents spying. But I have no problem with specific cases of specific individuals judged as needing closer monitoring, like ankle monitors for flight risks.
- prepend 7y ago
  Surveilling your kids is not the complete answer, but it is certainly part of the answer. I think there’s a false assumption that these kinds of apps are used by parents to replace communication and other methods, but it’s part of strong communication between kids and parents.
  - notzuck 7y ago
    Another reasonable point downvoted on HN as this comment will be too I'm sure. Some parents will abuse this ability and there's nothing to government should do about that. Good parenting is hard and some form of tracking is important. My daughter had a phone from the age of 10, she uses it for google and email at school (it's part of their classes), texting me when her bus is near the bus stop so I can drive to collect her and for texting her friends. She is not allowed to use her phone to install apps that can communicate with people that she does not already know and this is something I periodically check on with the view that I will check less as she gets older. I am actually super impressed that she is not addicted to her phone like you would imagine a young girl would be. One of her friends does have instagram and other social media, I have checked her pages out and she has many followers that are men and much older than her. I wish her parents would check her phone more often. Regardless of what some childless anons on the Internet think, it's bloody hard to parent in the age of the iPhone. A simple solution is to not let your kids have anything but I've always believed that giving access to what everyone else has is fine as long as it's controlled with reasonable boundaries put in place.
    - jsjohnst 7y ago
      > Another reasonable point downvoted on HN as this comment will be too I'm sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - notzuck 7y ago
        Yeah I can read. Doesn't mean I still don't want to moan about people downvoting him just because they're digging their heals in. He said something reasonable, a response would have been better than a downvote.
- singingboyo 7y ago
  I commented on your original post, but: this seems like a parenting issue, and doesn't really have a technological or regulatory solution.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop. surveillance [1] n. Close observation of person or group, especially one under suspicion. n. The act of observing or the condition of being observed. --- This is CERTAINLY your responsibility toward your children. (The lack of it is known as "neglect".) Personally, I do not let my 6 year old go to the small neighborhood park by himself. But if he has a remote monitoring device, I do. As he gets older, there will be other cases where he will be allowed to do things only under some type of supervision. Obviously it varies by age and maturity, where age 0 requires earshot proximity, and age 17.5 requires comparatively minimal attention to diet, education, and recreation. "No surveillance full stop" is simply wrong. "No electronic surveillance" is I think unwise and ignores opportunities for safe, constructive experiences. "No secret surveillance" is I think a fair statement. https://www.wordnik.com/words/surveillance https://www.wordnik.com/words/surveillance
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Just be careful and know when to change strategy. There will come an age where your son's concepts of trust and responsibility will undergo a metamorphosis, and ordering them to keep a surveillance device on them might make them develop trust issues, and atypical expectations of privacy in their personal relationships, which may take them their entire young adulthood to work through.
    - errantspark 7y ago
      I can't agree with this enough, and I feel like the slope along which you slide as you start treating your offspring as a human and not a ward should be steeper and start earlier in almost all cases. P.S. '93 til ;)
      - soulofmischief 7y ago
        That song is the soundtrack to my life. As someone who still had a bedtime of 8pm in high school, I agree with you. I ended up leaving home at 16 just so I could live on my own terms.
  - 7y ago
- 1000units 7y ago
  Kids are dumbasses and require supervision. This includes surveillance because they will inevitably try to hide important things from you.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    I'm, by all measures and statistics, not a dumbass, and yet still qualify as a child / dependant. My parents gave up on trying to track / surveil me because I knew more about tech than they, and because it was more or less an open challenge to me to try and break whatever software they installed. Do you want someone peering over your shoulder and breathing down your neck all the time?
    - 1000units 7y ago
      No, because I'm now better equipped to guide my own life than my parents, and it would cause them unnecessary burden. I understand many parents are poorly equipped for this task to start, but that's a different problem. There are a very few people I really trust and love in my life, and if they had a crystal ball into my soul and history and could read my every thought and action, I wouldn't mind. In fact, if we were smarter and could handle that scale of information I'd even like it. I'm as open with the people I love as possible. Surveillance becomes an issue when it is done by adversaries, such as various large corporations you and many people here might work for, your government at every level, etc.
- chooseaname 7y ago
  > Parents and kids need to be able to trust each other. Absolutely this. However, there's a caveat. If a minor gets in certain troubles, the parent is held responsible. So, if a parent knows their child has a tendency towards stuff that will get the parent in trouble, I'm a lot less against the parent using tech to keep the child in line.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop. I generally agree. But the solution here isn't lecturing people on the internet. The solution is helping parents find better parenting methods. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I've tried to write about it and one piece I wrote got more than 60k page views. But it didn't make me any money. And I'm quite open about being dirt poor and wanting to develop an earned income. On the one hand, I would like to see the world be a better place with better solutions. Poor parenting has larger consequences, including higher incarceration rates down the line. On the other hand, one of the things wrong with this world is the shitty way women get treated. Part of that is an expectation that they don't deserve an earned income for so-called "soft skills" (oft called emotional labor). They are expected to do caring type things out of the goodness of their heart. I've literally been helpful to people with big personal problems -- because I'm quite good at that -- while I was homeless and been told, more or less, "Fuck you. My needs matter. Yours don't. Quit panhandling the internet." So I'm at a point where I kind of feel like "No, fuck you. I don't owe you anything, you asshole." I stopped giving away so much of my time and expertise for free via the Internet to ungrateful assholes who think I don't deserve anything in return. I don't know how we make a better world. But I'm quite clear that volunteering to be a victim for the benefit of other people isn't it. All that does is teach them their abusive bullshit is totes fine. So if you want a solution here, find some way to help parents be better parents that doesn't involve them crapping on someone else in the process. I don't know how you do that because actual parenting experience fails to have the cache that college degrees have. So I don't know how you find someone with answers that actually work that the world will actually respect as a bona fide expert. College degrees don't necessarily confer genuine expertise in this domain, but it's the kind of thing audiences will pay for.
  - concordDance 7y ago
    Probably HN is the wrong venue to get sympathy. Here everyone is constantly giving away extremely valuable information for free. Information that is verifiably valuable as opposed to parental advice that you can't check the value of very easily People around here (and indeed in most of the internet) are paid for their information in attention and kudos. Your information would need to be almost unique and worth >£1000k for you to be able to sell it for money in todays attention starved market.
- dannykwells 7y ago
  Sounds like someone doesn't have kids. Full stop.
jdnenej 7y ago
A better system would be to require that it is very clear the user is being monitored. Some kind of persistent notification and popup on every boot notifying the user of the software. This way it still works fine for corporate setups but is useless for stalkers
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I think macOS Catalina has taken some steps to implement this type of approach. Users will be notified when an application starts key logging or taking screenshots. I'm not sure how frequently though.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Never knew my employer was my legal guardian :-)
raxxorrax 7y ago
So I could legally stalk employees? That is a ridiculous back door.

singingboyo 7y ago

There's nothing forcing someone to install the app, at least in a stalker situation. Secretly install... maybe, but check your damn phone permissions, people! As with many things, there are good and bad use cases. For teens, it's a bit more complicated due to family dynamics, but frankly this seems like a parenting issue that has not changed significantly from how things worked before. Instead, it's just changed form slightly because parents can passively track rather than actively pestering their kids about where they were/are/will be. Bad parenting is not a technological creation. Also, maybe Life360 is just a questionable example, but as far as I know everything there can be toggled in app. Permissions can be denied too. Unless parental controls can stop those options?

azernik 7y ago
These apps were designed to be installed when the phone owner left their phone unguarded, and to be unnoticed by the phone owner. Poor man's Evil Maid attack. TFA: "To install the apps, the purchasers were required to bypass mobile device manufacturer restrictions, which the FTC alleges exposed the devices to security vulnerabilities and likely invalidated manufacturer warranties. In addition, while Retina-X claimed in its legal policies that the apps were intended for monitoring employees and children, Retina-X did not take any steps to ensure that its apps were being used for these purposes. Each of the apps provided purchasers with instructions on how to remove the app’s icon from appearing on the mobile device’s screen so that the device’s user would not know the app was installed on the device, according to the complaint."
- paulddraper 7y ago
  I agree the evil maid attack is a misfeature. I assume many people use it without that aspect.
  - azernik 7y ago
    It's not a misfeature, it's the main intended market.